Bone Magician Book

Quite a few years ago I read this author's The Black Book of Secrets and loved it to pieces. Recently it occurred to me to wonder if she'd written any more books in the interim, and . . . Well, okay, so I can be a bit slow on the uptake on occasion. Blame it on the fact that I'm not much of a series reader.

The Bone Magician is set in the same general milieu as was The Black Book of Secrets, and has various other points in common -- most notably the fact that its protagonist is an orphan boy. In this instance that boy is Pin Carpue, whose mother died a while ago and whose father is on the run, suspected of the murder of Pin's nasty uncle. There's a murderer at work in the city, the Silver Apple Killer, and prominent journalist Deodonatus Snoad is running a campaign to have Pin's father sought for these atrocities too.

To make his way in the world, Pin gets a job as apprentice to a local undertaker, Goddfrey Gaufridus. One of Pin's jobs is to sit beside corpses overnight to make sure they are genuinely dead. Gaufridus has a phobia about accidentally burying someone who's merely in a coma; aside from taking the precaution of nighttime corpse watching, he's developed a whole torture chamber of wicked little tools that with luck would rouse someone from even the most profound stupor.

One night, while corpse guarding, Pin falls into drugged semiconsciousness and witnesses two strangers bring the corpse to life for the benefit of a third, the dead woman's boyfriend, who seeks -- and gets -- her forgiveness for the dreadful quarrel they had shortly before her death. When he regains full consciousness, Pin discovers the corpse is once more properly dead. He resolves to find out more about the so-called bone magician and his pretty young assistant, Juno . . .

The city in which this tale is set, Urbs Umida, is like a sort of fantasticated Dickensian London, and the characters (and character names!) have a similarly Dickensian flourish. Other writers brought to mind as I romped through The Bone Magician were Mervyn Peake and Jeffrey Ford, while there's a dash of Terry Pratchett in there somewhere too. Really, though, Higgins has her own voice; the Dickensian comparisons just add to the fun.

And there's plenty of fun to be had here. Although the book's marketed as for middle graders/YA, I'd suggest adult readers are likely to get more fun out of it than anyone, not just because of the richness of its language but because every now and then you sense that, while most of the jokes are in plain view, there are others lurking just beneath the surface of the text, so to speak, and some of those are slightly, and quite delightfully, smutty. As for the humor in general? Well, here's a sample:

At one time Rudy had an entire circus under his command. Rudy Idolice's Peregrinating Panopticon of Wonders. . . . At the pinnacle of his success he had five caravans and over twenty exhibits. Sometimes he boasted twenty-one, depending [on] how he felt about the two-headed man.

The Bone Magician offers a fast, totally absorbing and often hilarious read. My one objection -- and this is no reflection on the quality of the novel -- is that the text is printed, at least in the edition I picked up, in a rather light sepia. At a superficial glance this is visually appealing in a quaint sort of way, but when it comes to the actual reading -- especially the reading of Pin's journal extracts, done all in italics -- the joy of the quaintness wears off fast. This should be no problem for those with younger eyes, but for the codger readership it's a bit of a pain in the fundament.